‘Industry-Wide’ DRAM Glitch May Be Old News

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A so-called industry-wide memory problem reported by Hewlett-Packard last week may be less pervasive than the PC maker implied.

Officials at IBM and Dell Computer have been unable to turn up samples of the flawed memory modules HP reported late last week. Meanwhile, two memory suppliers said they had completed their own testing, and found that the problem reported to HP was tied to a module design phased out several years ago.

HP’s announcement of the glitch caught other OEMs and memory suppliers off guard. Instead of a quick statement released to the press, the announcement was backed by a comprehensive replacement program and a press release that claimed other OEMs were also at risk. At issue was “a design flaw in certain notebook memory modules used across the industry,” HP said.

That forced HP’s competitors to treat the problem as serious, even as officials said that they hadn’t been able to reproduce the glitch. “We have not seen the notebook memory issues that have been reported, but we are continuing to look very closely to determine if Dell notebooks are affected by this,” said Anne Camden, a spokeswoman for Dell.

Likewide, IBM published a statement saying that it too had not found any evidence of the memory glitch as well as the ICH-6 flaw that Intel also reported.

According to an HP spokesman, the lockups appeared when memory from Samsung Semiconductor Inc, Winbond Electronics Corp., Infineon Technology Inc., and Micron Technology were used with Intel’s Intel 845MP, 845MZ, 852PM, 852GME and 855PM mobile chipsets and either the Mobile Pentium 4 or Pentium M microprocessors. The glitch was not caused by the chipsets or processors themselves, he said, but by the memory from the four manufacturers. The flaw resulted from a poor self-refresh exit timing circuit, which could corrupt the memory’s contents.

On Wednesday, a spokesman for Infineon Technologies claimed that the affected memory was confined to a small batch of memory that shipped years ago.

“HP has notified Infineon that one single module design revision of a 256MB SO-DIMM supplied by Infineon is also affected by these problems,” said Saswato Das, Infineon’s director of media relations for North America. “This special module type has only been supplied in small quantities and during a limited period of time prior to mid calendar year 2003 and represents only a very small portion of the 256MB SO-DIMMs supplied during that period. Infineon does not consider any other of its memory modules to be affected by this problem. Infineon and HP have already reached an agreement regarding this issue. The associated liabilities for Infineon are not material.”

Because of the long lifecycle of corporate notebooks, analysts speculated that an intermediary may have stockpiled older DRAM and then shipped them to OEMs. Module manufacturers typically buy discrete DRAM chips and mount them on printed-circuit boards, creating the DIMMs used by PCs and notebooks. Some DRAM manufacturers, like Micron, either have in-house units that build modules or subsidiaries that perform the same function. Independent module makers also design and sell DIMMs, as well.

A spokeswoman for Kingston Technologies said her company hasn’t confirmed if any of the affected modules are in the company’s inventory. “Obviously, it is unclear just how widespread the problem is,” spokeswoman Heather Jardim said.

“Kingston has reproduced the problem in-house and has done extensive testing to determine the extent of the problem,” she added. “Our findings are that the problem is isolated to a particular revision of modules that were discontinued in Q3 of 2002. We’ve tested the various revisions of modules that we are currently shipping and found that they do not exhibit this problem.”

One Kingston customer  not HP  also discovered the module glitch at their facilities, Jardim said. Kingston is replacing the modules.

Officials at Samsung Semiconductor said in a statement that they were aware of the problem and working with HP to solve it. Representatives at Micron Technology did not return repeated calls for comment.

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